What makes you working class?

[Bdueb]

Was listening to an interview with oa well known actor talking about their childhood and growing up working class. For them a key part was lack of travel and having not left their local area much etc. That was 20 years ago. What about now - what do you think distinguishes working and middle class childhoods of today?

@Whelm Mortgages used to be very hard to get hence paying for houses in cash. It kept house prices low. That housemaid was paid a tiny amount. It was more like the cost of an au pair before NMW applied.

My parents, one of them still alive, bought their first house for cash in 1959. It cost under 1,000 guineas. No housemaids though.

Housemaids died out after the second world war as opportunities for work increased for women, and people had more money. Only the upper class could still meet the increasing costs of employing staff.

Gucci - at least DD has. A willingness to mix Gucci with Primark, too.
Also family ski holidays - renting a large chalet etc.
My family is working class with middle-class relations. This is what some of us do - I don't ski, however, but I know several are going, only one (a GP) would I define as middle-class.

A thousand guineas was a lot of money in 1959. In cash. Interesting!

The emergent service worker is a weird class. As someone who is former service worker😂
Alao apparently if your household income is under 50, but you rent and have 100+k in savings you are financial insecure emergent service worker... I had a play with it

I consider myself WC, DH MC.
I grew up in 70s/80s
So for me WC dad blue collar worker in a factory, mum a cleaner/worked in canteen.
Lived in small victorian terrace, shared room with my sister.
Didn't go abroad.
Went on holiday to pontins/butlins but not every year.
Dad used to spend a lot of time in the pub, mum did everything round the house-she was in charge.
We were poor and we knew it, couldn't always afford school trips, food was for specific meals, even fruit was rationed. New clothes were very rare treat.
Very traditional dinners, meat, 2 veg, no foreign food including pasta. Never ate out.
Went to very rough comprehensive and local primary school. Left school at 16

DH, grew up living in large detached houses, had au pairs and cleaners.
Dad was a lawyer mum was a teacher. They had a Pony, holidays abroad, had food like pasta and curries, parents paid for his driving lessons and first car.
Educated in local village primary school then private secondary school. His siblings and parents all went to university

I think WC and MC lines have blurred and changed in the past 30-40 years.
But housing, type of job, and expendable income is still a big marker, if you still believe in class.
But basically class =wealth, opportunity(or lack of) and that does and will always exist no matter what you call it

I’m WC because I grew up with young, but loving, parents in social housing, and my dad had a manual blue collar job and mum worked PT and looked after us. I had free s school meals, and we had little spare money. My parents valued Education & I was the 1st in family to go to higher ed/ university. Then my sister. Then 20 years after that my mum
went as a mature student .

My children are solidly MC - they have all the trappings and are growing up in a household in the top % income.

They have all the extra curriculars,go in holiday a few times a year, can afford all the school trips - even ski ones- and will go to uni.

No lavatories

Went to All Inclusive 3 star Benidorm hotels for holidays - they’d put on drag acts as entertainment in the evenings etc - we shared our dinner table with v northern w/c couple

Growing up working class with limited funds and being surrounded by similar people.

WC and MC are too wide as categories now, and probably have been for the last 30 years.

That’s why ABC1C2DE is still considered quite useful. It’s occupation based, but splitting WC and MC into different levels is probably more accurate.

There’s the MC of ponies, nannies,
and holidays in villas in Tuscany, and there’s the middle class of office jobs, 2 weeks AI in Greece, and obsessed with an RG uni for their kids (possibly cos they didn’t go themselves).

I've often had a bit of an identity crisis about this. I still consider myself a working class girl because of my accent, my upbringing, how I was socialised growing up on a council estate until the age of 14, the shit rough school I attended, topping up gas and electric meters, the smoking/drinking/pub culture, sharing a bedroom and bathroom, limited money, the occasional bailiff knocking the door etc. These are all fundamental experiences to my outlook on life and have shaped me as a person.

I now live in a private estate, in a £1.4M house, I'm a housewife and have no financial worries. My neighbours enjoy horse riding and speak RP. Their upbringings and political views are alien to me (champagne socialists).
I'm sure people would scoff if I were to tell them 'I'm working class' now. But I am and always will be.

I know people working in relatively senior management who have worked their way up to those positions and now live in million pound houses in very desirable areas with too of the range cars etc. They would cringe at being called middle class and really promote working class identities in terms of football team support, pub going, accent etc. I think there is a real desire for these people to hold onto parts of working class culture as part of their identity and so on reality there class could be seen to indeterminate. The area they live in features a lot of wealthy working class who have made wealth not necessarily through professional routes and in their opinion there is an abandonment of more traditional working class areas as they become more diverse especially in the inner cities.

My daughter is about to read a Christmas Carol and at the moment I am reading Daniel Deroanda. What strikes me is to understand the history and literature of this country it does help to see how class ridden this country was historically and maybe such debates as we are having now are a legacy of this?

At least in Dickens she working class are given character; with George Eliot the then working class were either gently mocked or deliberately omitted as meaningful.

It's really interesting because maybe we hold onto a class system as something ultimately integral to our country and being British? Look at support for the monarchy and a legacy interest in the landed gentry. I think the ride has turned to a large extent and now even our politics is certainly not defined by traditional class divisions.

I think some of the scoffers on MN confuse (deliberately) middle class for upper-middle class, and call lower-middle class working class.

I think, on here, most of the people being told they are working class are middle, or lower-middle.

Eg, people who have a good/above average-paying job, own a mortgaged home in a nice area, have a decent car (even if it's on <gasp> PCP), holiday in Spanish AI hotels that are 4-5 star, have children who do all the activities, buy clothes from the high street etc - these people are middle class. I think culture is now so wide among the middle class that people within it will frequently have interests and do activities on a spectrum of what would have been considered upper/middle/working class.

The people who have been given 500k to buy a house outright by their parents when they turned 18 and have horses and don't need to work due to family generational wealth and investments are not middle class, they're upper.

People on low wages/benefits, for whom life is a struggle and with little-to-no security in their finances, job, and housing are working class. Culture is limited, not because they are incapable of appreciating the opera/ballet/skiing/humanities degrees for the joy of learning, but because it's too expensive to be something they could realistically do (or do frequently) so they can't get into it.

If we take working class literally then that encompasses 99% of the population as well all work or have productive lives to some extent. Historically I think the middle class were defined as at least partly buoyed by generational wealth so may have been actually quite a small proportion of the population. Also higher classes owned businesses and means of production (hence the old concept of marxism). There were defined middle and upper classes in many societies who it could be argued exploited the workers for their lifestyle. The Russian and French revoutions were born out of a hatred of a class structure that exploited workers for centuries and were attempts to bring in classless societies (which obviously in time failed).

Britain unlike the US and French has need had a revolution so we have never had a seismic assault on the class system and indeed with our historical love of monarchy seem to in part welcome it. Maybe we now have a class obsession because in many ways class does not exist in a traditional sense but we still have a desire to map out lives into class brackets as we have never historically really abandoned it.

I personally think class is a fading concept but we have to consider a poor demographic carefully as I think we have effectively a new relatively poor class who could be defined vaguely as having unskilled insecure jobs coupled with rented/social housing (often with migrant families). It is this vague newish class that needs defining in my opinion to effect social policy as I think the 'he's middle class of we want to use that terms encompasses well paid skilled workers, managers and the self employed as well as traditional professionals and so is a different beat to 80 years ago.

I consider myself working class as my parents occupations were very working class. I still consider myself working class despite a good career and salary, as for me it’s my roots and where I came from. Social mobility is common now, but for me, i’ll always consider myself to be working class, and proud.

Is nursing a working class profession? I know of someone about to graduate with a 1at class degree I nursing as part of her training who feels nursing doesn't automatically confer middle class status.

Nursing is not a working class profession. A nurse I knew was the daughter of an earl. It is a vocation.

If you haven't already gauged that the class system is just about one-upmanship, mumsnet is the right place for you.

I brought nursing up as it is becoming increasingly obvious we can't map profession to class. Once profession doesn't link to class the whole idea becomes more vague in 2024.

I wonder whether the question of a nurse really depends on location. I think inn London, it would definitely be a working class profession. The pay is just too low. Plus it's not aspirational i.e. I don't know anyone around us who would aspire for their child to be a nurse - we live in a very middle class suburb of London.

I also thunk they many teachers would be perceived as lower middle class in London unless they have a rich partner.

In fact, the middle class part of homeownership means that quite a few professions such as nursing, teaching no longer make you middle class as you will never buy a home on those salaries.

It is not only about salary but also the status of a job. For example, I have a factory worker friend who is earning more than many nurses under the higher level pay band, yet nursing is a higher status profession.

Nursing might be a higher status profession than factory work but it's still not aspirational if you are solidly middle class. Plus the salary is not high enough to buy a house in London even if there are two of you.